You can listen to the post read aloud or read it for yourself below:

This line from a book I recently finished keeps haunting me. It comes nestled in the context of learning how to use the “friction inherent in all intimate relationships as a stimulus for conscious growth” (Bourgeault, The Meaning of Mary Magdalene, 119). The process the author outlines is what she says “is an exercise in the pure generosity of standing in the other’s place, discovering what it means to love one’s neighbor as oneself—not as much as one’s self, as egoic consciousness always appends, but as the intimate expression of one’s own being” (121).

I’m taking a deep breath again as I type these words and read them aloud. Let me attempt to unpack this a bit.

A lot of what I read and write about in my spiritual journey these days has to do with the journey from egoic consciousness to a higher level of consciousness. The ego tells me that I am what I own, what I feel, what I accomplish. It invites me to compare, to cling, to defend myself against others, and spins false stories for me to believe (such as I can’t be at peace until this outside circumstance or person changes). Some forms of literature, such as the enneagram, refer to this as the false self. The process of dying to the ego and laying it down is what is known as kenosis, or non-clinging. It is what is referenced in Philippians 2 regarding Yeshua that he “did not consider being equal to God a thing to be clung to, but emptied Himself.” The journey of allowing this false self or ego to fall away is what leads to higher levels of consciousness, an awareness that we are something deeper and more profound than the surface level of our lives. The idea is that from this deeper place one becomes grounded in a sense of abundance and cannot be so easily moved by the circumstantial events and chaos of our lives.

Part of this process towards higher conscious also includes a unitive consciousness.

That’s a fancy way of saying that we start to realize that not only are we able to become more and more one with the Divine, but we also take on a realization that we are inextricably linked and interconnected with everyone around us. Most of us live oblivious to it, our ego teaching us to think in an individualized way. But if we are all made in the image of the Divine, if we all carry Divine DNA in our being, and if we are all given the opportunity to live in oneness with the Divine, then we are all interconnected. [Forgive me if that seems like a huge leap that I’ve taken years and piles of books to reach an understanding of. Perhaps it will peak your curiosity to explore.]

This unitive mindset is a huge part of what Bourgeault writes in that phrase that has haunted me: “discovering what it means to love one’s neighbor as oneself—not as much as one’s self, as egoic consciousness always appends, but as the intimate expression of one’s own being.”

This means, when I look at my husband, for instance, that I am to love him, not out of a sense of duty or religious obligation or even just romantic attraction, but because in loving him, I am also loving myself. He, in some ways, is an intimate extension and expression of my own being.

I can’t get past this. First, because, if I’m transparently honest, when I look at my husband, I don’t see someone who is an intimate expression of myself. My ego brings all my attention to the surface. It tells me how much we are different. It highlights frustrations, ways he does things differently than I do that my ego wishes he did more like me. What? He’s an expression of myself. You’ve got to be joking?! Yet wisdom tradition challenges my thinking and tells me this is so. You could apply this same thinking to your children, your extended family, that person at work that you hate to get along with, the person at church you just can’t understand. Take your pick. The opportunities abound for as many humans exist in your orbit.

This concept also takes well-worn verses such as Matthew 7 from the Sermon on the Mount and flips them on their head: “Stop judging, so that you may not be judged. For with the judgment you judge, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.” Suddenly this religious concept of “don’t you dare judge or God’s going to measure it back and judge you” is transformed into a realization that “of course I shouldn’t judge another, because that other is an expression of myself; if I judge that other, I am judging myself.” There’s no angry God mentioned in that verse at all. Our ego or religious training has taught us to imagine it there. Yeshua is merely pointing out, what you do to another you do to yourself, and what’s implied is because you are all interconnected.

The second reason this concept haunts me is a part of my inner being rises up and resonates with the truth of what it presents. It’s a glorious invitation. And it’s also a horrifically daunting self-assessment, especially for a perfectionist who can see where she wants to be—the glorious vision of what is theoretically possible—and the reality of where I actually stand in being able to walk it out. The gap is so monstrous.

I took my struggling to my last session with my spiritual director. As I sit there pouring out my failings and what I see and want to be true and lamenting what is not actually happening in my relationships, my spiritual director asks me a question.

“Where is your relationship with the Divine One in all this?”

My rational reasoning stops dead in its tracks. This is not the question I expected. It almost doesn’t feel relevant to what I am rambling on and on about. But then I have a knowing sense that it is exactly the right question.

This is not a logistics issue, not a matter of my failings. This is a trust issue. I don’t yet trust the Divine enough to live this way.

“You cannot be anywhere other than where you are,” my spiritual director advises me for not the first time. “You can only seek out the very next step.”

Cognition versus Practice

I genuinely believe, on a cognitive level, in a stream of Divine abundance that is ever-present and always available, that all I have to do is align and drop into it within my awareness to partake. However, my day-to-day actions and reactions betray I don’t believe this in my core. The proof is in how I still act and react from a place of scarcity, of believing there won’t be enough to go around, that I have to claw and fight and defend my boundaries and well-being or everyone will just take it from me and bleed me dry. I can conceive of a higher way, but I am not yet living there. I catch snatches of it, perhaps, here and there. Divine moments when I am able to remember and choose another way. But these are the aberration, not the norm.

I have written of such themes before, and I fear becoming a broken record. Yet a broken record is what I need right now. This place of abundance vs. scarcity is my current crucible, the place I return to day after day, month after month, to fall over, break on, lament with, pray through, and wait. Wait for next steps. Wait for internal transformation to come, something I don’t have control over. I can sit down for meditation. I can train myself to observe my inner being, to notice and witness the moments when I react out of fear and scarcity. But I can’t will myself to trust. Transformation comes in some mysterious mix of Divine alchemy, a meeting of ways—some of which I can choose to be faithful to, and some of which I wait upon for revelation. In some form or other I may be here for years. Decades perhaps. “Seeing is the gift,” my spiritual director reminds me. “Most don’t see the gap at all.” Seeing is the beginning.

I long to rest in that. Yet I am impatient. “I have to parent my children now,” I lament, wishing for a more transformed self here and now in this moment in their tender years where every lost temper, every missed moment of attunement seems to have such high stakes in how they will shape their own sense of self-worth, their own vision of the Divine. “Yes, you do,” my spiritual director says. “But you can only parent from where you are right now.” And trust that it will be enough, I add in my own litany.

I sigh. The line between shame and genuine conviction can be so muddied. Where am I being too hard on myself? Trying to force and do what is not mine to do in the transformation process? And where am I being genuinely drawn to alter and grow? Each day the answer seems to shift, never staying in one place for long.

Stages of the Process

Before I finish, I want to point out an irony I’m finding in this journey. Words such as “kenosis,” “dying to self,” or “surrender” are making their way back into my consciousness after years of setting them aside. In my trauma from the cult, these were words and concepts what were used to overpower and abuse, couched in the language of spirituality. As I’ve deconstructed and looked back on my earlier years of faith, it strikes me now that my younger self’s sense of dying to self was still very much rooted in the ego. While it was intended to be an attitude of the heart, and genuine as much as it could be, there was only so deep I could go in that stage. Therefore it often translated into conforming to external behaviors, acts of service, and muscling through “doing the right thing,” often giving away most of my boundaries in the process. I’m a decade into therapy now, and one of the things I had to learn first was boundaries and self-care, which on the surface seem opposite of dying to self. So when I’ve reached these concepts again of non-clinging kenosis and considering others as an extension of myself, I’ve had to stop and wonder, am I going back to where I was before? How do these two ways of being intersect?

I don’t have complete answers, but I do know that now these words of dying to self mean something quite different. It’s not a matter of capitulating or handing power over me to someone else. It’s not about giving away all my boundaries. This dying is something deeper and more subtle, something I don’t quite have words for. It’s a laying aside of the false self, which empowers me to be more of my true self that has been waiting there all along. It’s claiming a Divine birthright, something that happens on another plane, in another realm. Something I suppose you won’t understand until you understand it too. It’s not a knowing that can come in the head. It’s a knowing one much reach with one’s whole being.

Hopefully I have inspired curiosity more than confusion in these thoughts. I pray they meet you in your own journey in a way that gives you courage. Whatever the case, if you choose to return to this space, I’m sure I’ll still be here wrestling through my own version of the journey over and over again. You are not alone. I bless you in yours.

Resources:

• Previous posts related to these concepts:
  • The ego/false self: No One Else Can Grow Me Up but Me
  • Abundance: Scarcity versus Abundance
• Recommended reading for more on the ego: A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose by Eckart Tolle

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Shalom.